To Dust

Perhaps you walk
down the western slope
in the dying of light
and watching the old dog, still
running yet, chasing the ricochet buzz
of blowflies, tracer fire in the low sun

you look on the metal seam
the river-line, its hills falling
one beneath the other
and the dust, thin spirits
calling up to heaven
and think, well, of history,
of happiness, of what else it is
you might have found
down there, beyond the gate's rust

Berndt Sellheim is a poet, novelist and occasional academic. He has taught creative writing and poetics at UTS, and lectured in philosophy at Macquarie University, where he completed a doctorate in phenomenology in 2008. His poetry and critical work have been published in periodicals such as Meanjin, Heat, Island, Overland, Best Australian Poems, Plumwood Mountain, Eyeline and The Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology. He is the author of Beyond the Frame’s Edge (Fourth Estate, 2013) and Saint Vitus Dance (Fourth Estate, Forthcoming). He recently completed his first collection of poems.